Durham Regional Road 2

Infobox road
highway_name=Durham Regional Road 2
Kawartha Lakes Road 2
alternate_name=Simcoe Street
maint=Durham Region and Kawartha Lakes
marker_

direction=North/South
direction_a=North
terminus_a=Kawartha Lakes Road 9
(Woodville Road)
direction_b=South
terminus_b=Durham Regional Road 62
(Harbour Street)
counties=Durham
Kawartha Lakes
cities=Oshawa
Scugog
Brock
Kawartha Lakes

Durham Regional Road 2, or locally known as Simcoe Street is a main road in the Regional Municipality of Durham and the City of Kawartha Lakes, Ontario, Canada. The majority is a regional road, marked and maintained as Durham Regional Road 2 from Harbour Road (Durham Regional Road 62) in Oshawa north via Port Perry and Seagrave to Woodville Road (Kawartha Lakes Road 9) west of Woodville. [Regional Municipality of Durham, [http://www.region.durham.on.ca/departments/planning/regionroadmap.pdf Roads Map] , January 2005]

The road is sometimes referred to Kawartha Lakes Road 2 north of Durham Regional Road 6 in Seagrave. This is because the road marks the boundary between Durham Region and Kawartha Lakes. [City of Kawartha Lakes [http://www.city.kawarthalakes.on.ca/BusTour/PDFs/OverallCityMap.pdf city map] , accessed September 2007] The road continues south to Lake Ontario in Oshawa and north to near Bolsover as a locally-maintained roadway. Durham Regional Road 15 is a short east-west road from Beaverton on Lake Simcoe east across Highway 12 to the Kawartha Lakes line; it mostly uses Concession 5, but the portion heading southeast from Beaverton to that road is known as Simcoe Street, as it was part of the original road.

Durham Regional Road 2 was a trail used by the Mississauga Indians to get from their beaver trapping grounds in Osler Marsh (near Lake Scugog) to Oshawa on Lake Ontario, where they traded with the French. [Tracey Arial, Hiking in Ontario, 2005, p. 67] It later became a road used by Europeans, connecting Oshawa with Port Perry on Lake Scugog, and extending beyond to Beaverton on Lake Simcoe. [Thomas Griffith Taylor, Canada: A Study of Cool Continental Environments and Their Effect on British and French Settlement, 1950, p. 474] In the 1840s, Abram Farewell of Whitby Township advocated the organization of a toll road company to improve the road between Port Perry and Oshawa, allowing grain and timber from the port to reach Lake Ontario at two places (Whitby already had a plank road , now Highway 12). [Leo A. Johnson, "Farewell, Abram", Dictionary of Canadian Biography Volume XI: 1881 to 1900, 1966, p. 311] The road was never improved with tolls.Fact|date=September 2007

References